If you want to know what sort of stuff Richie McCaw is made of, then Steve
Hansen, his All Blacks coach, offers this telling portrait through the
almost comical charade that unfolded before their big games in last year’s
World Cup.

Force of nature: Richie McCaw will attempt to bring England to their knees at TwickenhamPhoto: GETTY IMAGES

“We knew his foot was broken, but none of us were ever game enough to ask him whether it was,” said Hansen. “And we knew that if we asked him, he wouldn’t have told us anyway.

“The medical staff knew, because he’d already had it broken before [and needed an operation to have a screw fitted nine months earlier] and Richie knew if they X-rayed it, they would say he can’t play. In turn, they knew he would refuse to have it X-rayed because he was just so desperate to play.”

The week would unfold thus. “He’d say, ‘I want to play but I just need to stay off my foot’,” recalls Hansen, then Graham Henry’s assistant. So he would only attend training to give his verbal input and trained for just 10 minutes on the eve of the game. Yet after all that meagre preparation, he would still go surfing round the pitch like “a big white shark”, the unendingly voracious predator of world rugby. “It showed his incredible mental strength.”

In his new book, McCaw himself tells how he wandered round the team hotel in Auckland, trying to convince everyone there was nothing wrong when, actually, he could barely walk. How did he ever still play like a demon on one leg? “Adrenalin is the ultimate painkiller,” he found.

The point was that this unspoken arrangement between McCaw and the team management was down to trust. Said Hansen: “He’s a pleasure to work with because his morals, values and decisions are all based on the team and not on himself.”

When he finally guided his country to its Holy Grail last October at Eden Park, he paints a wonderful picture of his emotional release. “I bend over, hands on knees, then sink to one knee. We’ve won. I should be happy. All I feel is relief. It’s finished. I can stop. I don’t have to do this anymore.”

If his storybook career had ended there, it would have felt perfect. There were, in theory, no more ambitions. Yet here McCaw was at the All Blacks’ team hotel yesterday, saying that he feels a completely different athlete this year, stronger than ever and ready to inspire his side to complete an extraordinary unbeaten year at Twickenham.

He was even suggesting, at 31, that he was looking forward to a long sabbatical starting tonight which, after he goes travelling for a few months and misses New Zealand's June Tests, would only help him return “to play the best rugby I ever have”.

Is that possible? Why not, he says. He was voted man of the match in his first Test against Ireland 11 Novembers ago and also in his 115th against Wales last weekend. On Monday, he is odds on to collect the IRB’s player of the year award for the fourth time, already having been the only man ever to have won it more than once.

So if he is not the greatest player of all time, which South African coach Heyneke Meyer anointed him recently, surely there could be no argument with Hansen’s assertion that “he’d be the most consistent, the guy who has the greatest performances week in, week out”.

Nothing has been able to stop his manic digging for victory. Broken bones, concussive career-threatening hits to the head, hoodwinked referees, you name it. This week, the Norovirus knocked him out for a day but he promises he feels great now as he prepares for his 79th captain’s innings.

Could he imagine himself being back here for the World Cup in 2015? “That’s the idea,” said McCaw, of his World Cup ambitions. “I feel like I’m still improving. I’ve added a little bit of extra size this year and that’s helped with the physical impacts on the pitch.”

With the toll the modern international game takes on the body, Hansen just shakes his head at McCaw’s feats. “Well, you just can’t describe it,” he says. “He’s just a modern day warrior, with this massive sense of pride in his country, a good bloke who doesn’t want to let anyone down.

“We’ve already had a discussion about 2015 and both agreed that the team would come first. So we’ll take it campaign by campaign but you wouldn’t bet against him playing. If not, he’ll be here in some capacity – he loves being a pilot so he might even be flying us over here!” Either that, or New Zealand will trust that the real McCaw will, as ever, walk across water to work another miracle here.